Spring 2007
Social entrepreneurship leader, teacher Gergen signs on to teach with HLP
The Hart Leadership Program (HLP) is pleased to announce that entrepreneur and leadership consultant Christopher Gergen will be joining the HLP faculty family for the fall 2007 semester. As a visiting lecturer, Gergen will teach HLP's core social entrepreneurship class, Public Policy 144 “Enterprising Leadership.”
A 1993 Duke graduate, Gergen is a founding partner of New Mountain Ventures, LLC, an entrepreneurial leadership development firm that has started nearly 20 organizations, generating more than $100 million in revenue and serving thousands of people. Clients include corporations, public schools, government agencies, and non-profit groups (www.newountainventures.com). Gergen is also the co-founder of SMARTHINKING, a venture capital backed online tutoring company that serves more than 70,000 students in more than 500 universities and colleges (www.smarthinking.com), and LEAD!, a non-profit leadership, service, and entrepreneurship program for Washington, D.C. high school students. Additionally, he consulted on the launch of Entrepreneur Corps, a component of AmeriCorps* VISTA that places business leaders in one-year posts with community organizations with the goal of augmenting their entrepreneurial skills. Gergen is the co-author of the forthcoming book Life Entrepreneurs: Mavericks in the Art of Leading and Living (Jossey-Bass).
“Christopher Gergen is a well-known, young social entrepreneurship expert and a gifted teacher,” says Professor Alma Blount, director of HLP. “We are very excited to have him join our faculty in the fall.”
Gergen will also represent the third generation of his family to teach at Duke, Blount adds. “His family has deep ties in Durham,” she says.
“Following the teaching legacy of my Grandfather and Dad at Duke is very exciting and a little humbling” Gergen says. “I'm thrilled to represent the next generation in my family—and to work with the next generation of Duke student leaders.”
As the new instructor for PPS 144, Gergen will take the helm of one of HLP's most popular classes. Traditionally taught by Tony Brown, professor of the practice of public policy, PPS 144 focuses on enterprises that combine social mission with commercial strategies. The course's key themes include ethics, citizenship, and public policy implications.
Gergen hopes to create a class environment and theme similar to those of public policy classes that he took as an undergraduate student at Duke.
“What I enjoyed about those classes is that they were the most hands-on and gave me valuable insights into communities where I ended up doing a lot of work,” Gergen says. “What I'm hoping to do within the context of this class is to bring my own entrepreneurial experiences to bear and bring in successful and passionate entrepreneurs who can share their insights and perspectives along the way. I'm hoping to connect this experience with the fresh and fertile ideas that the students are going to bring in. I know that students have a real sense of possibility and a sense of what they want to do. I'd love to marry that passion with real-world practice.”
Gergen adds that he hopes to maintain Brown's dual legacy of promoting community-building and of acting more as mentor than just professor.
“I fundamentally believe you can teach entrepreneurship, and exposing people to the possibility of entrepreneurship is what this class is really about,” Gergen says. “More than anything I feel that my role as a professor is going to be one of coach—supporting the projects that are starting to take shape…. I'm coming in with what I think is a pretty exciting structure, but I'm looking to create a collaborative environment so that it can evolve and get better with each class.”
Additionally, Gergen hopes to build bonds with entrepreneurship classes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and to make the class' projects primary feeders for the new DukeEngage initiative, a campus-wide program that will support students in service-learning opportunities.
After graduating from Duke, Gergen earned a Master's in Public Policy with a focus on Education from The George Washington University as well as a Master's of Business Administration from Georgetown University . He has studied or worked on five continents (including starting a coffeehouse/ bar in Santiago, Chile ), which has provided him with experiences as a community organizer, teacher, and kayak instructor in various parts of the world. He now lives in Seattle, Washington with his wife and two-year old daughter.
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